


for the hunger and nothing less

by autoclaves



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Established Relationship, Fluff, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Canon, Romance, and has issues with religion, character study on how much crowley loves aziraphale, crowley is just like: be dumb have feelings & never process trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:55:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23594197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: “Tell me you love me,” Crowley demands. Pleads. It’s always the space between the two for him. Too much, too fast, always; he can’t help it. You lose the light once, and it keeps you reaching for it again and again until you scald your hands with the hunger of it. He’s been half-starved since the garden.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 132





	for the hunger and nothing less

**Author's Note:**

> i should really be studying for a math test i should really be studying for a math test i should really be studying for - 
> 
> title is from ocean vuong's "on earth we're briefly gorgeous". the full line is:
> 
> "Tell me it was for the hunger  
> & nothing less. For hunger is to give  
> the body what it knows  
> it cannot keep."
> 
> which i feel is a very quintessentially crowley quote, i've been wanting to use it in a good omens fic for a while now

_And you have fixed my life — however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me._  
Wilfred Owen, in a letter to Siegfried Sassoon

 _They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.  
_ “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, Ocean Vuong 

_And everything I ever did was just another way to scream your name…  
_ “South London Forever”, Florence + the Machine

—

The room is warm, warm enough to satiate even Crowley’s coldblooded form, the slipsnake side of him that craves sunlight and starlight and slumbering heat. It is a little-known fact that hellfire burns cold. Holy water, in fact, is the one that feels like immolation.

Aziraphale has his arms around him, his too-skinny waist and sharpened hipbones. Crowley had made them without really knowing what hips looked like, or that hips had bones to begin with; he thinks they look pinched and jarring against the expanse of his skin, but Aziraphale adores them, so they stay. Crowley has _his_ arms draped over the angel’s shoulders, and they’re swaying in the middle of the living room like that. Freddie Mercury croons over ancient speakers that have suddenly remembered how to be speakers again. 

_Who wants to live forever_ , Freddie sings, and Aziraphale smiles like a burning sky. “Six thousand years, my love.” 

He reaches a hand to cradle Crowley’s cheek, his crooked jawline, the corner of his lips. All the quietly profane pieces of him that scream _demon_ , and Aziraphale brushes over them like he is something precious. The touch is a blasphemy in its own right; Crowley wonders that it doesn’t ache.

“A lifetime, five lifetimes. A hundred lifetimes with the two of us superimposed over all of them. As close to forever as anyone might get, wouldn’t you say?” The warmth is seeping off him in slow pulsing waves. Crowley pushes himself closer still to that heat, the slipstream mess of his physical form traitorously eager. The body has its own secrets, and his only ever craves to fuse into the curve of Aziraphale’s embrace. Into the softness that Aziraphale holds within his own self.

“It isn’t enough. It won’t be, ever, with you,” Crowley says, as honestly as he is able to. He turns his head into Aziraphale’s palm—warm, always warm, as if the light is trying to leave him—and presses a soft kiss to it. Aziraphale makes a small agreeable noise in response. They shuffle around to the music, ungainly like an eight-limbed creature. 

It’s him, it’s always been him. Six thousand years, centuries passed in stars, and Aziraphale at the mouth of its widening gyre.

—

Crowley is well-versed in the graceless trade of heartbreak. 

Six millenia leaves a lot of things unsaid; he’s categorized them all. Things he is selfish about. Things he is unselfish about. Things he has never spoken out loud. Somehow all of these are one and same, a single line in a cosmic love letter consisting of six thousand years’ worth breaking and mending. An unsaid dialogue for every scene. (The garden. _I’ve always loved the promise of warmth too much for my own good. I was never meant to want quietly._ History, _in the places they’d forgotten about us. The books won’t write about the angel and the demon who followed him. The books don’t often get the whole picture right. Only fragments of it—a pair of wings, an unbearably good deed, two hands brushing. Humans tell stories in miracles, and that is enough for them._ Another miracle, a whole pile of them, a bag of books to prove those stories right. _It means, I will love you. In pieces, in splinters, in whatever fireside tales you give me._ The Soho lights. _I can wait. The history of us proves that much. For once, I wish you would choose me.)_

The song restarts with a gentle hum, an endlessly spinning record. _What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us?_

“Tell me you love me,” Crowley demands. Pleads. It’s always the space between the two for him. Too much, too fast, always; he can’t help it. You lose the light once, and it keeps you reaching for it again and again until you scald your hands with the hunger of it. He’s been half-starved since the garden. 

Aziraphale looks at him, rainwater eyes singing. _(Remember the rain? I loved you first and dearest in the rain.)_ “I love you,” he murmurs easily. “With everything I have, Crowley.”

The hand on Crowley’s face pushes upwards, two fingers stroking the hellbrand on his temple before curling into the spikes of hair just above. Spikes—skinny, stiff in a defense-mechanism way _._ Aziraphale never notices it, the _keep out_ s and _stay away_ s and warning signs. He just runs his hands through Crowley’s hair and calls it rusted, calls it starstuff. Crowley inhales, even if he doesn’t have to. Anything to remind him of this moment. He wasn’t made to love in this way, and yet, here he is, the fierceness of it threatening to burn up the stars Aziraphale names into his hair. An entire sky of flaming constellations; desecrated as evidence of what a demon would do for love. 

It scares him, it does. But then there is Aziraphale, beautiful and timeless and brightened in his arms, holding him safe. There, in every history that Crowley remembers. _I love you, I love you, I love you_ , a brand seared into the human flesh of his human heart. They’d have to kill him to find it.

Crowley’s never been good with words. This corporation is slippery under his presence, so he prefers to act on his meaning. He drops his head onto Aziraphale’s shoulder instead and they both understand perfectly what words are being said now. Aziraphale gathers him up, sharpness and all, just as he has always done.

_And we can have forever, and we can love forever._

“We can, my love,” Aziraphale says softly into the blueshift dusk of the room, into this space that he and Crowley have made for themselves. This world created itself, without the help of heaven or hell. They will do the same. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


End file.
